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Debugging Software

By Susanne Wallace, Anna Brown, Lewis Irvine, William Saunders and Paul Secular. As part of the Bath debugging workshop we attempted to find the cause of a segfault in a lattice disorder Monte Carlo code written in C. We were working without a known solution as recent unrelated additions to the code had fixed the bug without revealing why. We were able to find the cause of the segfault using memory checking and debugging tools to narrow down the location of the bug, with print statements to finish.

By Eike Mueller, University of Bath.
If you are anything like me, you write code which contains bugs (in my case: lots of bugs). You probably also use code or tools written by others, which might contain even more bugs (e.g. in compilers, scripts, external numerical libraries etc.).